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Sunday, January 13, 2013

`He'd Give Henry James a Run'

Dan Pinck
went to work as a “legman” – researcher/factotum – for A.J. Liebling at The New Yorker in 1949. Almost half a
century later, in 1998, thirty-five years after Liebling’s death, Pinck
published in TheAmerican Scholar reminiscences of the man who, he says, “remains
one of my teachers.” Here is the opening sentence of “A.J. Liebling, a Writer
at Work”: “Mr. Liebling always wore a smile or a promise of one.”
And here is Pinck’s closing sentence: “He was a sweet man.” In between is a loving,
not uncritical account of a great American writer by a man who, at the time he worked
for Liebling, had already served as an agent with the O.S.S. in China during
World War II. Pinck can write, as most
memoirists cannot:

“Sitting behind his typewriter on a
gray metal typing table, facing me, standing halfway between parade rest and at
ease, he appeared to be two characters. One was a replica of Buddha, a small
statue that I had bought in Peking in the fall of 1945; the other, a
comfortably stout cellist, whose cowcatcher of a stomach compelled him to sit a
fair distance from his typing table while, arms outstretched, he played the
keys of his Royal typewriter. I thought he was overstuffed but not fat. Like
many persons partially defined by girth, his feet, noticeably protruding on my
side of the typing table, appeared to be stuffed into his plain, unpolished,
black shoes, as though the shoes were at least one size too small. Mr. Liebling
almost always wore a handsome, striped blue suit, democratically rumpled, whose
jacket seemed incapable of being buttoned, or having ever been buttoned. He
simply smiled. And so did I. We looked serenely at each other, he behind his
wire-rimmed glasses and I behind my tortoise shells. I enjoyed being in his
presence.”

This is portraiture worthy
of Liebling himself (the Buddha statue and “comfortably stout cellist” are
Lieblingesque, as is “democratically rumpled”). From Liebling I learned many
things as a writer and man. He was kind, humorous and hard working. The most
revealing anecdotes about him, reported by Joseph Mitchell and others at The New Yorker, describe Liebling laughing
with delight as he typed away at a story. He was our wittiest writer, more consistently
funny than Mark Twain or S.J. Perelman, and earned the right to laugh at his
own stuff honestly. He was also a phenomenal reporter with expertise in food,
boxing, France, war, politics and what Harold Ross called “low-life.” Here’s
Pinck on Liebling’s penchant for taking few notes (a practice I never tried to emulate):

“Undoubtedly he carried in the
library of his mind a generous investment of knowledge that buttressed whatever
new information he needed that he somehow accumulated, in a mysterious fashion.”

There’s a personal quality about
Liebling’s work that seldom descended into the first-person egotism of the New
Journalists. By nature, Liebling was an enthusiast. He was happiest writing
about people and things he liked and admired. If he kvetched, we knew it was a
joke. He didn’t write screeds against despots and newspaper publishers; he
laughed at them. Fundamentally, Liebling was a writer, not a prophet or social
critic. Pinck writes:

“Liebling was no journalist. What he
was was an essayist of the first order: in the style, tone, wit, and scope of
the learned, imaginative ingredients he put in the bouillabaisse of his pieces.
Even the titles of his pieces are significant clues that he was sailing on an
essayistic tack: `How to Learn Nothing,’ `Two Pounds for a Dime,’ `Mr. Capone
and Other Primates,’ `Aspirins for Atoms,’ `Down with Babushkas!’ `Antipenultimatum,’
`The Indian Pathologist,’ `Who Killed the Monkey?,’ `Potemkin Rides Again,’ `My
Name in Big Letters,’ and `My Professional Career Ends’ herald the essayist,
not the journalist.”

And this, another of Pinck’s Liebling-like
drolleries:

“To consider Liebling a journalist
is like labeling Virginia Woolf a journalist because she wrote so many articles
and reviews for newspapers and periodicals. Virginia Woolf described this work
of hers as `journalizing freely.’”

And this:

“An old journalistic rule is to
write short paragraphs, and a corollary is to write the paragraphs in
descending order of importance [known sententiously as the “inverted pyramid”]…Liebling
ranged quite the other way in many of his opening, and subsequent, paragraphs.
Liebling wrote some of the longest paragraphs in The New Yorker. He'd give Henry James a run.”

In
a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker
(1953), Liebling formulates the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse:

“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the
subject makes sense.”

1 comment:

Liebling was unable to follow the sensible regimen of his idol, Col. Stingo, who proclaimed: "I have 3 rules of keeping in condition. I will not let guileful women move in on me, I decline all responsibility, and I shun exactious luxuries, lest I become their slave."This is in Joseph Epstein's Essays in Biography.